Pandora Recovery helps to recover permanently deleted files that cannot be found in the Recycle Bin. The program works with NTFS, NTFS5 and NTFS/EFS partitions. You can preview deleted files of certain type (images and text files) without performing recovery. A deep cluster scan mode is also available that is able to recover files whose MFT record has been overwritten, or when the file allocation table is missing or corrupted. In addition, Pandora Recovery supports recovery of archived, hidden, system, sparse, encrypted and compressed files, as well as ADS (Alternate Data Streams).

The program will ask you to fill up a survey upon exit when you run it for the first time, which you can skip by clicking the "Close" button.

Note: Latest version of this program is ad-supported and has not been tested for portability. A mirror for the 1.4 version has been contributed post in forums (thanks NickR).

14 comments on Pandora Recovery

zikarus2007-07-19 07:37

AntiVir detects and identifies this proggie as a virus (Trojan)...

Sean2007-07-20 00:15

Yup, AntiVir sure does.Though checking online with other virus checkers, nothing else finds anything wrong with it. I see several references to websites when viewing it in a hex editor, some to verisign, one to pandoracorporation.com(which redirects to pandarecovery.com)With all it does, it almost just seems too good to be true... I'd be kind of weary of running it....

Mancubus2007-11-22 00:32

If I don't install it but simply extract and run, it says "Pandora Recovery tailed to initialize. Critical component missing. Please re-install the software and try again." and closes. If I install it, I then can run it from anywhere. Whan component may I be missing that Pandora installs?

sentry422007-11-22 09:49

It seems to require the following registry value:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PandoraRecovery]"Anchor"=dword:000000a9

If this value is not found, the program returns the error message you saw.

I haven't had time to check if there's a workaround for this or not (but I suspect not). Maybe someone else has more time on their hands...

Queue2007-11-24 21:24

You don't even need that anchor entry it seems; the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PandoraRecovery] simply has to exist. The program also auto-generates a resource DLL based on the neutral_res DLL and your local language DLL in the Lang subfolder when it's first run (creating pmres.dll) and needs an %appdata%\PandoraRecovery\Profile.xml file to exist, or for the %appdata%\PandoraRecovery folder to not exist at all (in order to properly generate it). Basically, the program has some specific needs in order to properly start up and not throw an error message about missing files.

That said, it's a pretty swanky utility.

Mancubus2007-12-24 23:29

Thanks everyone for answers. I have checked your recommendations. In my case only the advice by sentry42 worked.

Known_Issues2008-06-23 04:54

The free pandora recovery is not designed to be portable, you can find that out by reading content of their faq:

Can I copy Pandora Recovery from the original media to another disk drive and run it?No, Pandora Recovery won't work on another disk drive.

Hovewer, you can purchase portable pandora recovery+flash drive (not for free, of course) on amazon.com. The advantage of the portable version is you can use it for your business, while free pandora recovery is for your personal use only.

a2008-07-09 08:27

what kind of file recovery tool writes to the hard drive, wouldn't that defeat the purpose for appropriate recovery since the chances of the files beinf overwritten increase with disk writes.

JeanUntel2010-10-20 14:18

Very good software that can search across all sectors of a hard disk for traces of files like .DOC, .XLS, ...

zylstra: Sometimes the developer makes changes to their program that aren't free or portable, which we of course don't have any control over. In the case of Pandora, we tried to find a mirror or host for the old version without success.